Overview

WinEQ 2 is a powerful but easy to use utility designed to increase the playability, as well as falicitate multitasking and ability to run multiple sessions of EverQuest and other supported games.

Windowing

WinEQ 2 forces your game to play in a window, rather than full screen mode. That means faster switching to other applications, such as an internet browser or chat program, or even another game. That doesn't mean it will only take up a portion of your screen, however. WinEQ 2 Pro provides a window preset that causes the window to appear full screen (among other configurable presets)! All the benefits of playing in a window, with the beauty of playing full screen!

In older games, the ability to place the game in windowed mode was considered taboo because it could allow the player to cheat much more easily. In reality, if the player wanted to cheat they would do it anyway (for example, another computer to be used for peeking at a game's network traffic and grabbing otherwise hidden information). Therefore, many older games do not support windowing.

Today, game developers generally realize that people need access to other resources while playing their game (Google, fan sites, instant messengers, email, etc), and potentially playing multiple accounts on their online gaming system (which in turn requires more subscriptions to their service), and that cheaters are far too tricky to let windowing stop them.

Although we do not condone cheating to gain an unfair advantage in a game, we do condone windowing and think it should be an integral part of all social games such as MMOs. Most new MMOs already have the game itself in a window, but as you may well know, WinEQ does not just put the game in a window -- it is capable of much more than that.

Simple Preferences System

WinEQ 2 provides an easy way of configuring for each game. Settings are broken into games, and categories for each game. Profiles are used to allow different settings for each game, even multiple copies of each game. For example, one EverQuest profile may be set to be on the primary display with sound on, and another may be on the secondary display with sound off (additionally for EverQuest, each profile keeps its own EQ "last logged in" information so it doesn't need to be re-typed each time for multiple accounts, and allows custom eqclient.ini files to be used per profile to have different EQ settings per profile, replacing the benefits of using multiple folders).

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Picture-in-Picture (Subscribers Only)

World of Warcraft Picture-in-Picture

WinEQ 2 provides single-window Picture-in-Picture. Imagine trying to play two characters at the same time, with only one monitor. You can either play in two small windows, or only have one character in view at a time, leaving one potentially vulnerable. With WinEQ, the last game window to be in focus can automatically place itself in a smaller window on top of your current one. This means that for the cost of a small portion of your main window's visibility, you gain a great amount of visibility for your other character, albeit small. The size and placement of the picture window is also configurable.

Video Capture (Subscribers Only)

WinEQ 2 provides an easy-to-use video capture system, which automatically encodes the video to WMV format (requires Windows Media Player 9 or later). This system is not designed to replace other, possibly more powerful video capture utilities for video capture buffs, but instead to introduce video capture capabilities to a wider audience. Our system can be configured to trade off quality for speed (making videos places extra load on your system, causing the game to have slower framerates) as well as length and space. Where other utilities may require unusually large hard drives with plenty of room to spare, ours can be configured to be a viable solution for average users, and does not require knowledge of video editing tools to convert to a format for sharing with others.

Here is an example video which we recorded in World of Warcraft at an in-game resolution of 640x480, with a 60% rate of capture (e.g. 1 of every 3 frames is skipped), and a resulting video of 640x480 at 60% image quality. The clip is 57 seconds long and is about 10 fps (the game was running at about 20 fps; the rate of capture setting allows the video to be about 60% the framerate of the game). The video was taken with the compression option on, which slightly decreases overall framerate but allows longer videos by using up less temporary space. This particular video did not include sound, but the option is of course available and does not significantly increase the size of the video. Note that the video is only about 2MB in size, making it easy to share!

World of Warcraft

System Requirements

512MB of RAM (more if playing multiple sessions of games simultaneously)

Tips

Everquest

EverQuest uses about 300MB of system RAM minimum per session. Typically, EverQuest players like to play with higher settings, much closer to 400-500MB per session. If you plan to play multiple characters on the same system, keep this in mind!

EverQuest uses about 32MB of video RAM minimum per session. Some settings, including resolution and color depth, can bump this up to 45MB on typical systems. If you plan to play multiple characters on the same system, keep this in mind as well!

Your video card isn't the only source of video RAM! Spare system RAM can be used to pick up the slack through a BIOS feature called AGP Aperture, or AGP Window. However, there MUST be enough physical video RAM remaining to add another 3D display in order to load another session. The rest goes to loading textures.

Installation

To begin the installation process double-click the Lavish.WinEQ.x.xx.exe file.

You will then be able to select where you would like WinEQ 2 installed by entering the path manually or using the Browse button to select the path.

Once you have selected the installation path, click the Install button.

A desktop shortcut is created on the Desktop during the installation process. You can drag the shortcut to the Start Menu, Quick Launch Bar, or any other location you wish. You can also simply delete the shortcut and make your own method of starting WinEQ 2.

Note: WinEQ2.txt contains general information and announcements concerning WinEQ 2. This file is opened during the installation process.

Once the installation is complete, click the Close button.

Note: You will find information on how to perform a Quick Start procedure for each game under the specific Game Topic.

Basic Usage

Step 1: Install WinEQ2

Step 2: Run WinEQ2

Step 3: Right click WinEQ2 tray icon and select the game and profile to load.